“Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country through the process known as “chain migration” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an UNLIMITED relatives to the U.S. In the next 20 years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import 15 million new foreign-born voters. Between 7 and 8 million of those foreign-born will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.” JOHN BINDER

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

SETH BARRON - De Blasio Hurls Abuse at New York's Homeless

EYE ON THE NEWS

De Blasio’s Homeless Hypocrisy

New York’s mayor sneers at struggling street dwellers while opening the city’s arms to illegal aliens.

Remarking on the rise in homelessness on the streets of New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio sounded uncharacteristic of a progressive fighter for the poor and disenfranchised. He condemned people sitting outside begging for money, “who are bluntly just panhandlers, who are not even homeless,” but scrounge for handouts “because somehow they think it’s fun.” He contrasted these pleasure-seekers with “families who the only problem they have is an economic one . . . the cost of living in New York City, they could not keep up,” and also with people who panhandle because “they are in need,” and who often suffer from “substance abuse or mental health problems.”

Advocates for the homeless and the poor, not to mention many homeless people themselves, failed to appreciate the subtlety of the mayor’s distinction between what were called, in less sensitive times, the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. “De Blasio is a rich white man. He has never been in my situation, so he don’t know,” a panhandler named Donna Gay told the New York Post. “I ran away from a group home at the age of 14. I’ve been doing this way too long not having fun.”

De Blasio seems angriest at what are commonly called “crusty punks”— lavishly tattooed men and women in their twenties, often with dogs in tow, who populate the corners and parks of lower Manhattan, panhandling during the day and sleeping rough at night. The mayor, asked specifically about the “crusties,” explained that he is “very upset at the notion of anyone who in effect gives the impression they are homeless to make money.”

The subject arose because of news that the city’s street-homeless population has soared by 39 percent since 2016, according to the annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) count. The HOPE tally is based on a one-night canvas of the city by thousands of volunteers and provides a snapshot of homelessness, rather than a rigorous calculation. As such, the mayor has played down the unfavorable HOPE result, suggesting that the unseasonable warmth of the February night on which it was conducted left more people outdoors than usual.

The source of de Blasio’s frustration with those supposedly begging because they “think it’s fun or they think it’s a way to make easy money,” but who in fact “have a place to sleep” is that they make him look bad. His spokesperson clarified the issue, explaining that panhandlers “can skew the perception of the homelessness issue on the streets.” While there is certainly a phenomenon of people whose “hustle” is to plead for money out of cunning and cupidity, there is no evidence to suggest that a majority of the people begging on New York City streets go home at night to comfortable beds, or are just doing it for kicks as opposed to “dire economic need.” The mayor is asking us to reject the evidence of our eyes: that the streets are flooded with homeless derelicts. We’re simply victims of a “skewed perception” wrought by imposters and grifters. Mayor de Blasio thus sounds very much like the stereotypical heartless conservative, prattling about welfare queens or panhandlers with fabulous retirement accounts.

New York City maintains a program to deal with the curious problem of people who come here from out of town and wind up with nowhere to live. Project Reconnect, according to Isaac McGinn, a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services, “is a cost-effective way to help homeless households get back on their feet closer to their support networks”: a one-way ticket home. About 5 percent of the people in city shelters have previous addresses outside of New York City; Project Reconnect sends these homeless individuals and families back to their place of origin. It handles only domestic relocations: about 20 percent of its recipients are destined for Florida, and another 10 to 15 percent go home to Puerto Rico. Georgia and North Carolina are the next most common destinations. The city did not offer any information about international relocation of homeless immigrants, of whom it must be assumed that at least some exist.

As a “sanctuary city,” New York, according to Mayor de Blasio and the rest of the city’s leadership, welcomes immigrants from around the world who have come here to “pursue their dreams” of a “better life” for themselves and their families. Following the November election of Donald Trump, de Blasio gave a major speech at Cooper Union, telling these newcomers, “This is your home”—whether they were here legally or not. Illegal immigrants from Central America or China are offered sanctuary in Bill de Blasio’s New York; twentysomething crusty transients from Middle America, or just native New Yorkers down on their luck, are sneered at and given the bum’s rush.

Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal and project director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.

"The American financial and bankster oligarchy, steeped in criminality and parasitism, can produce only a government of war, social reaction and repression. In its blind avarice, it is creating the conditions for unprecedented social upheavals. It is hurtling toward its own revolutionary demise at the hands of the working class."

Despite being elected on a campaign slogan invoking “Tale of Two Cities,” pledging to fight the extreme economic inequality in New York City, the mayoralty of self-styled progressive Democrat Bill de Blasio has presided over a marked increase in poverty and a continuing rise in the cost of housing. Far from lessening the divide between the two “cities,” which has been growing for decades, the segregation, both economic and geographic, between the city’s wealthy elite and the working class, has only intensified.

The rate of poverty and the concentration of poor people living in impoverished neighborhoods in New York City have both risen dramatically in recent years. These are the findings of a newly released study by the Furman Center at New York University— State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2016. During the period from 2011 to 2015, 1.7 million city residents were classified as living below the official poverty line, set at the absurdly low level of $24,036 annually for a family of four. This represents 20.6 percent of the population, up from 19.1 percent in the 2006-2010 time span. Other, more realistic studies have shown that nearly two thirds of the city’s population suffer from some form of economic distress. Thirty percent of the city’s children are officially poor.

The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. The percentages of New Yorkers at the upper and lower ends of the income range grew, while those in the middle shrank. Between 2000 and 2015, households earning less than $40,000 per year increased by nearly three percentage points; those earning more than $100,000 grew by about one percentage point, but the ones in between shrank from 36 to 33 percent. Clearly, those in the middle are predominantly falling into poverty.

According to the Furman Center study, the geographic concentration of people living in areas of extreme poverty, neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the residents are officially classified as poor, had fallen somewhat since 2000, when it was 25.4 percent, to 19.4 percent in 2006-2010. This increased markedly, to 23.5 percent, from 2011 through 2015—a period of supposed recovery from the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. These are only the most acute examples. Nearly 45 percent of the city’s population live in areas of either high or extreme poverty (30-40 percent of the residents below the poverty line, respectively). Neighborhoods encompassing 16.5 percent of the city’s population, 1.4 million people, experienced a 10 percent increase in the rate of poverty, the study found.

Living conditions in these poor neighborhoods are appalling. In extreme poverty areas, serious housing code violations were registered at five times the city average and the employment rate was 20 percentage points lower.

Of the five New York City boroughs, the Bronx has the highest percentage of neighborhoods experiencing high or extreme poverty—52.6 percent.

One of the processes driving the increase in poverty is revealed by the report’s finding that the employment rate for the city as a whole increased by 2.4 percentage points between 2005 and 2015. Thus, while a slightly higher percentage of the population is working, the real value of their income is decreasing.

The Furman Center also found that as poverty is increasing, rents are continuing to climb, creating unbearable living conditions for a large portion of the city’s population. These are related phenomena. As the overall cost of housing continues to rise, relatively better off people are forced to move to poorer neighborhoods in search of more affordable rents. This, in turn, prompts landlords to raise rents in those areas, impacting existing low-income residents.

As an example, the study describes the case of East Harlem, a predominantly working class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. In 2000, the poverty rate was 37.1 of the population. It is now 37.5—again based on the absurdly low official poverty line. However, the number of residents with annual incomes of more than $100,000 has risen by more than 4 percent. Thus, while the overall percentage of people living in poverty is increasing, the economic spread between rich and poor is widening.

Simultaneously, rents in East Harlem are increasing at a rapid rate, with the monthly median rising $120 between 2015 and 2016 alone, putting extreme pressure on the already economically stressed residents.

The acute lack of affordable housing is driving large numbers of people onto the streets. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of city residents spending the night in homeless shelters increased by 87 percent, to about 61,000.

The situation is not new, but is becoming ever more severe. Despite fluctuations, the general trend of increasing poverty and lack of affordable housing has been continuing for decades, but has accelerated in recent years as the global economic crisis intensifies.

The extreme economic inequality that exists in New York City is starkly illustrated by the fact that while nearly two thirds of the population experience some form of economic distress, with over a third living in deep poverty, New York has the second highest GDP of all cities in the world. And yet, despite this huge amount of wealth that could be used to address the crises of poverty and lack of affordable housing, the living conditions for the city’s working class continue to deteriorate.

These statistics and many more presented in the Furman Center report starkly illustrate the utter failure to address the huge economic disparity between the city’s rich and poor by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The two parties, regardless of who lives in Gracie Mansion (the official mayoral residence) or who controls the City Council, are the representatives of the city’s financial and corporate elite.

All of the myriad programs that have over the years been presented allegedly to combat poverty, the lack of affordable housing, and resulting homelessness have been predicated on the need to maximize the wealth of the ruling elite. These programs have utterly failed to improve the former, while definitely facilitating the latter. Indeed, conditions for the mass of the population have only gotten worse.

In just one of many examples, there was a sharp decline in the issuance of permits for construction of new housing units in 2016, following the failure to renew the 421-a tax incentive program. That program, while greatly benefiting developers and large landlords, had done nothing to reduce the critical lack of affordable housing.

The working class of New York is rapidly approaching the breaking point. Mass revolt against increasingly unlivable conditions may erupt at any time. The anger and frustration find no expression within the present political establishment. What is required is the building of a party that fights for a socialist program to expropriate the vast wealth of the city’s elite and employ it to benefit the great majority of the population.

New York City commuters voice anger at decay of mass transit system

By our reporters12 July 2017

The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), which operates the buses, subways and three commuter rail lines in the New York metropolitan area, has been plagued by the failure of a century-old signal system, train derailments, and emergency track work this summer, causing significant delays for millions of people. New Jersey Transit and the federal railroad, Amtrak, have also seen significant problems.

With emergency repairs that began on Monday in Manhattan’s Penn Station, which handles 600,000 commuters a day, mass transit is slated to become even slower and more dangerous for the rest of the summer in what the Democratic Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, has called “the summer of hell.”

Delays and accidents on subways and commuter rails have raised social anger to the boiling point among the millions who depend on the system to get to work, to medical appointments, childcare or cultural activities. Trains are late, may be stalled in tunnels, and, particularly on the subway, are crowded to capacity. It is noteworthy that this slow-motion disaster is coming even when schools and universities are on summer break and students are not commuting to their schools.

There is little confidence among commuters that the political establishment has the will or ability to fix the aging infrastructure or even provide timely and necessary information about the state of the system.

A survey released this week by the City Comptroller’s office on Monday noted that riders have a level of anger that largely follows the patterns of inequality in the city. Sixty-eight percent of riders surveyed from the poorest borough, the Bronx, for example, gave the system a grade of “D” or “F” compared to 21 percent from Manhattan, the wealthiest borough.

The World Socialist Web Site took a sampling of the range of opinion among New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad (LIRR) riders at Penn Station on Monday.

Victoria Denton explained the difficulties she faces just in getting to work every day: “I am a private nurse who lives in the Bronx and works with the elderly in New Jersey. People like me have to take the train. It is impossible to drive anywhere in New York City. You have to take the subway. And New Jersey Transit is already always late. I get delayed all the time.

“New Jersey Transit raises the fare almost every year. In New York, they raise the fare every two years. Everything goes up except your paycheck. When on time, it takes me one hour and 45 minutes to get to where I have to go. I pay New Jersey Transit $32.50 for a round trip, and then I have to take a taxi to get to work.

“Governor Cuomo is no good. I thought he would do better, but he is not because the rich fund him. He works for the rich.”

Joel, who lives in New Jersey, commented, “The transit system is deteriorating. How did the governor and his predecessors allow this to happen?

“Indeed, the whole system that we live under has reached terrible proportions. Unemployment is terrible, and that has not been addressed either by Obama or Trump. Older people need more medicines, and need to be treated more humanely by the health care system.”

Charles Greenley, a day-shift Physician’s Assistant at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan who commutes on the LIRR, spoke to the WSWS at length about the problems plaguing commuters and the transit system:

“For the last three days, I have been working the night shift to pay my bills, and I have had little sleep.

“The transit failure is a reflection of the whole system. They have known for years that the workers necessary to maintain and repair the transit system are not being hired in sufficient numbers. I ride the LIRR, but this is not just the MTA, it is Amtrak and New Jersey Transit as well. Governor Christie has cut New Jersey Transit by 90 percent, and it is not so different with the LIRR and Amtrak. And the money they have is going to the super-rich personnel who control the system. These are bankers, venture capitalists and people with positions running the system. For the people on the street, the common transit riders, we get nothing.

“The transit system is very dangerous for the ordinary riders. I think in the next two years, the transit system will get worse, and many people will not be able to get to work on these trains. This will result in mass car and bus sharing that worsens the congestion and traffic jams which are going on now.

“The two-month repair project that Amtrak is starting today is not going to do anything because there is just too much to be done. There is too much that has not been done for years with track maintenance, track replacement, switch replacement and the travel cars. There is a lack of parts and there are defective parts because the agencies when they buy, they buy the cheapest parts.

“My worst delay was four hours on Amtrak coming from DC to New York two years ago. We had long delays at Trenton, New Brunswick and another stop in New Jersey. They claimed it was engine problems, and we were stopped for a long time on the tracks. Amtrak is so bad; I will only take busses now. I’ve been held up a lot of times on Amtrak, the LIRR and New Jersey Transit. I’ve been delayed five times coming out of Penn Station this year. These were signal problems. There are a lot of signal problems around Hicksville and Babylon. The elevators and escalators in Penn Station break down every three weeks. Then they say they are fixed only to break down three weeks later.

“I blame the super-rich for this, the people who control everything. They control the Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats and Republicans are like the two opposite fangs of the same snake. Whoever controls the snake is responsible for this.

“You ask about the bond and debt holders. The problem with this is the debt never goes down. The capitalist system is based on creating more debt and charging more interest on the debt. The super-rich own some of the bonds. And the super-rich own the two parties and the government.”

Damla Ozer is a Turkish student who got trapped in the extended delays that followed the most recent derailment of a New Jersey Transit train coming into Penn Station last Thursday night.She recounted her Kafkaesque experience that night: “Last Thursday night, I was with my friends in New York until I had to go home about nine o’clock. When I got to Penn Station, there were a lot of people here who had been waiting for a long time. I planned to take the New Jersey Transit train to my home in New Jersey, but when I got to the station I saw that there were a lot of delays posted on the board, and people were walking out of the station.

“I thought those people were walking out to take the PATH train. Then, I overheard a group of girls asking the police questions about what happened and what train to take, and the police said they didn’t know the answer to either question. The announcements in the station were not clear enough for me to know exactly what to do. I saw TV reporters talking to people, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. There were no people here at the Information Center where I have always seen two people.

“I didn’t really know where to go or what train to take; I figured I had better get in the line and go up to the ticket desk. However, the station was crowded and the line was very long. I got in one line, and it took me 40 minutes to reach the desk. Meanwhile, everyone else was asking the same questions, and we were all in the dark.

“At the desk the ticket agent told me I could take the PATH train to Newark. I have never taken the PATH train before, and the only way I knew which one to take was because the transit worker at the turnstile pointed which way I should go.

“Nobody told me that a train had derailed. Everyone was asking each other what had happened, but nobody knew. I had to read about it the next day in the paper.

“I got to Newark on the PATH a little after eleven. Then we had to switch. The PATH was packed. We arrived in Newark, and there were a lot of tourists who didn’t speak English. They were just running around panicked because they were lost and confused.

“At Newark, we sat on the floor because it was so crowded. We had to wait another hour. I didn’t get home until two in the morning.

“I have heard a lot about Penn Station. I’ve heard they haven’t done a lot of maintenance or repair. I don’t like blaming anybody, but obviously somebody is guilty because the transit system is so important in this city. It is an old system, and it needs a lot of work, but in a city of 8 million you can’t ignore it. In Ankara, the Turkish capital, the subway system is not as big, but we have never seen this kind of big problem with derailing. We have better transportation with busses which you can get on any corner.

“I hope Penn Station will get better. I hope it will get done by September, but I hear from people every day who have ridden the trains for a long time that they have their doubts.

“It is the same all over. In Turkey, there are no rights, no jobs, and people are afraid of losing the jobs and things that they have and ending up in jail. It is a crime to oppose the government. It is becoming like this all over the world.”

Chuck Todd on MTP does not ask Bernie Sanders about FBI

investigation of wife for $10 mill bank fraud

Chuck Todd occupies a singular position in broadcast journalism: host of the oldest program in the history of American television. Yesterday, he did something that must have Tim Russert, Lawrence Spivak and Martha Rountreespinning in their graves. He hosted Bernie Sanders, arguably the leader of the American electoral left, and did not ask him about the FBI investigation of his wife for a suspected $10 million bank fraud, nor about reports that he and his wife are lawyering up.

I am sorry: this is pretending that a potentially huge story does not exist, presumably to spare Sanders fans the pain of discovering that their idol might not be quite the idealist they supposed he was. The guy who once lived in a shack with a dirt floor now has 3 houses. But instead of even acknowledging the topic exists, Todd let Bernie off that hook. (He did press Sanders on his rhetoric of people dying if a GOP bill becomes law.)

The point of asking Sanders about the criminal law counsel he has hired is not the answer he would give. The only prudent answer would be that as a matter under investigation, he cannot comment on it on advice of counsel.

But that would have the fact of the investigation publicly acknowledged by Sanders on Meet the Press. That is footage that would make news for the program, and be in the best tradition of its broadcast legacy, one of the few remaining glories NBC News can point to. “Sanders declines to comment on FBI investigation” would be the headline on Drudge. It would spread via social media to Bernie’s entire fab base.

But that ain’t gonna happen, thanks to Chuck.

The obvious comparison to all the fuss made over a nonexistent FBI criminal investigation of President Trump’s “collusion” with Russia only highlights the importance of Silent Chuck’s help for Bernie and the Left.

The rallies each had an attendance of about 2,000 people, according to media reports. MoveOn.org sponsored all the rallies and local “progressive,” pseudo-left and trade union groups sponsored in individual cities. The Kanawha Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) cosponsored the Charleston rally, while the Service Employees International Union District 1199 cosponsored the Columbus rally.

The Better Care Reconciliation Act is the Senate version of the House Republicans’ American Health Care Act (AHCA), passed last month to “repeal and replace” the Obama administration’s health care legislation, commonly known as Obamacare. Both the Senate and House bills call for savage attacks on health care for working people, including the ending of Medicaid as a guaranteed government benefit program.

Medicaid is the government health insurance program for the poor and disabled jointly administered by the federal government and the states. It currently covers some 69 million people, nearly 20 percent of the US population. It was established in 1965, along with Medicare, the government health insurance program for the elderly. Enactment of the Trump administration measure will lead to the destruction of one of the three bedrock social programs dating from the 1930s and 1960s, the other two being Social Security and Medicare. Those programs will become the next targets for privatization and dismantling.

Senate Republicans plan to pass Better Care before the July Fourth Independence Day recess, setting the stage for negotiations between the Senate and House of Representatives and President Donald Trump’s signing into law of a final version.

There is immense popular opposition to the attack on health care embodied in the legislation, which would slash Medicaid by over $800 billion and provide tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans totaling more than $700 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the House version would strip 23 million people of health insurance. Enactment of the measure would constitute one of the largest and most blatant redistributions of wealth in American history.

A poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal revealed the depth of popular opposition to the House bill, which is similar to the Senate version. Only 16 percent of Americans thought the AHCA was a “good idea,” while 48 percent thought it a “bad idea.” Even among Republicans it had only 34 percent support, with 17 percent opposed.

Earlier this year, as the House bill was moving through that chamber, town hall meetings around the country addressed by Republican congressmen saw constituents denounce and shout down politicians backing the bill. In some cases, congressmen had to flee meeting halls under police protection.

Health coverage for tens of millions of working people has already been eroded by Obamacare, which slashes health costs for corporations and the government while increasing out-of-pocket costs and reducing benefits for consumers. Now Trump and the Republicans are going significantly farther in denying people access to health care.

Sanders and his faction within the Democratic Party are well aware of the explosive anger in the working class and among broad sections of the middle class over the attack on health care. That is why, under conditions where the Democratic Party establishment is pleading with the Republicans for a reactionary “compromise” and is too petrified of the potential for mass political unrest to call for public protest, Sanders is seeking to get ahead of the situation and make sure that social opposition is channeled once again behind the Democratic Party, where it can be stifled and dissipated.

At the beginning of his Pittsburgh speech, Sanders stressed the reactionary character of the Republican bills: “Let me be as clear as I can be—this so-called ‘health care bill’ passed in the House last month is the most anti-working-class piece of legislation passed in the House of Representatives in the modern history of this country. And the Senate bill in some respects is even worse.” He went on to describe the legislation as a “massive transfer of wealth from working families to the very, very rich.”

But the perspective Sanders advanced was anything but a call for mass social and political protest. Instead, the stated goal of his rallies was “to put pressure [on] senators in those states—specifically, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia—and Senate Republicans at large to vote against the legislation.”

The bankruptcy of this approach is underscored by the fact that Toomey was part of the 13-senator “working group” that drafted the Republican bill in secret. In his speech, Sanders addressed Toomey directly, pleading with him to vote “no.”

This is an attempt to derail and demoralize working-class opposition by diverting it into futile efforts to pressure the bribed political representatives of big business. It is of a piece with Sanders’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the favored candidate of Wall Street and the CIA, in the 2016 elections, and his so-called “political revolution” to “transform” the Democratic Party.

Sanders and other speakers promoted his bill for “Medicare for all.” The Vermont senator knows full well that such a measure will never be passed by Congress, having no chance of acceptance by either of the two capitalist parties. Moreover, Sanders supports Obamacare, which involves a $700 billion cut in Medicare spending. He backed Clinton for president, despite her explicit opposition to an extension of Medicare to the entire population.

Just two weeks ago in his keynote speech to the “People’s Summit” in Chicago, Sanders touted the California Senate’s passage of a single-payer health care bill as evidence of the supposed success of his “political revolution” in shifting the Democratic Party to the left. On Friday, however, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Democrat, effectively killed the bill, blocking it from coming to a vote in the state’s lower legislative chamber.

Even if Medicare for all were implemented nationally, it would be woefully inadequate to meet the needs of working people. The program has already been significantly privatized, and Medicare recipients are forced to pay private insurers for expensive supplemental insurance plans to cover essential medical services and prescription drugs.

Perhaps the point most underscored by the rallies is how bare-bones health coverage already is for working-class Americans. Most of the speakers—including health care professionals and spokespeople for Planned Parenthood and other organizations—spoke about the ongoing health care crisis in the United States, including the opioid epidemic, inadequate access to mental health services, difficulties in accessing contraceptives, and the high rate of uninsured and underinsured Americans. Nevertheless, the speakers generally argued that Obamacare was a progressive “step in the right direction.”

This proved a difficult circle to square for the speakers, especially Sanders. After all, if Obama’s Affordable Care Act was a progressive reform, why are working class people facing such a health care catastrophe?

Both the Obamacare status quo and the Republican proposals entail immense suffering for workers and a further decline in their standard of living. The only way to guarantee adequate health care for everyone is the socialization of health care: the removal of profit considerations and the placing of the health care industry under public ownership and the democratic control of the working class.

This can be achieved only through a complete political break with the Democratic Party and all of its promoters, including Sanders, and an independent political movement of the working class for socialism.

June 24, 2017

Bernie and Jane Sanders lawyering up for FBI fraud investigation

Just when Bernie and Jane Sanders thought they had it made as the icons of the American left, along comes a mean old Republican to spoil it with accusations so serious that the FBI is investigating. In a long and sympathetic article, Politico Magazine explains:

Jeff Weaver, Sanders' longtime top political adviser who heads Sanders' political organization, Our Revolution, confirms to Politico Magazine that Bernie and Jane Sanders have lawyered up. The couple has retained Rich Cassidy, a well-connected Burlington attorney and Sanders devotee, and Larry Robbins, the renowned Washington-based defense attorney who has represented I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and disgraced former Rep. Bill Jefferson, to represent Jane Sanders in the matter.

Now, President Donald Trump's Justice Department is handling an investigation that will proceed at the discretion of a U.S. attorney of Vermont that Trump has yet to appoint.

Jane is portrayed as a victim. The story is going to be that enemies of Bernie are hounding poor Jane:

"I made it clear I didn't want him to run," she told me at their campaign headquarters at the time, "but if he decided to, I would be behind him 100 percent."

The Snidely Whiplash villain in this piece comes from conservative aristocracy. LawNewz:

The investigation stems from an Jan. 10, 2016 letter sent to the then-U.S Attorney for Vermont, Eric S. Miller. The law firm diGenova & Toensing LLP, [that would be Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing – ed.] representing local parishioners, contend that Burlington College President Jane Sanders engaged in fraud when her school purchased land from a Catholic diocese.

In 2010, the now-defunct Burlington took out a bank loan to make the deal, but that required a minimum commitment of $2.27 million in grant and donations. The letter, authored by Bracy C. Toensing, said she supplied evidence saying they had $2.6 million in the needed money.

But it didn't turn out to be the case, Toensing said.

"At the end of fiscal year 2001 (six months after closing on the loan), Ms. Sanders had collected only $279,000 in donations, which was less than 25 percent of the $1.2 million Ms. Sanders guaranteed to the bank that she would have collected in that year," he wrote.

Politico elaborates:

Backed by six exhibits and a dozen documents, the four-page letter described how Jane Sanders had "orchestrated" the purchase of 33 acres along Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont's largest city, where her husband had minted his populist political brand as mayor. The deal closed in 2010, when the senator's wife was president of Burlington College, a tiny, obscure, nontraditional school that always seemed to be struggling for students and funds. The letter alleged that to secure a $10 million loan and execute her grand plan to expand the college, Jane Sanders had falsified and inflated nearly $2 million that she'd claimed donors had pledged to repay the loans.

Sanders had "successfully and intentionally engaged in a fraudulent scheme to actively conceal and misrepresent material facts from a federal financial institution," the letter alleged. It pressed for a federal investigation into potential bank fraud.

When Jane Sanders made the offer to the Roman Catholic Diocese, Burlington College was nearly broke – with an annual budget just below $4 million. In order to finance the property, Sanders secured a $6.5 million loan from People's United Bank in the form of a tax exempt bond purchase, and the Catholic Church agreed to carry a $3.65 million second mortgage on the property. Sanders told both institutions that Burlington college had $5 million in likely donor pledges and $2.4 million in confirmed pledges to be used to pay off the debt.

But wait – that was just for the property!

What Jane Sanders didn't plan for was the $6 million or so required to actually build out the campus on the property to include green space, athletic fields, lecture halls, and walkways. Oops!

Disaster…

Sanders' original claim of $2.4 million in confirmed donor pledges was quickly reduced to $1.2 million according to documents filed in the first fiscal year after the purchase – yet in records obtained by VTDigger, Burlington College received only $279,000. Despite hopes by Sanders and college trustees that they could boost enrollment and expand the student body, nothing changed – and the school failed at raising the money to satisfy it's loans.

And then Jane Sanders was fired, with a $200,000 severance package.

In order to try and avoid bankruptcy, Burlington college sold off pieces of the 33 acre property to a local developer – which allowed the institution to pay off some of the debt Jane Sanders had accumulated, however in April 2016 the bank called it's loan – and on May 28th, the college closed it's doors after 44 years in operation.

You can have confirmed, contractual deals for $1.2 million and only actually receive $279,000. Those are two completely different things. One could argue that only actualizing about a quarter of the total committed says something about the trajectory of the college's finances, but that's a much more nuanced argument than these two sentences suggest.

A third donor had offered a $1 million bequest, to be paid upon her death. Instead, the college's loan application counted it in funds to be paid out over the next few years.

Um… welcome to accounting. This account sounds shady, but – without vouching for any specific accounting principles – recognizing revenue in installments even if it's coming in a lump sum is perfectly acceptable. Again, that's not saying it was the appropriate way to account for this request, but the way this report reads makes counting funds over time seem like an insane tactic when it's just not.

Um...people do go to prison over accounting decisions on recognizing revenue and misleading shareholders, regulators, or lenders.

For the moment, Jane Sanders probably is less worried about being convicted by a Vermont jury than she and Bernie are about paying for those lawyers. For all their posturing against greed, Bernie and Jane are thrilled with the financial consequences of Bernie's campaign. They rushed out and spent more than their reported net worth on a third house last August like some seven-figure jackpot lottery winners. Saving and financial planning are not their strong suit, which is why people like Bernie and Jane should never be put in charge of anything, even a little hippie college.

I have known ambitious leftists like them – affluent, but with modest net worths – and almost without exception, they feel underprivileged when it comes to wealth, no matter how comfortable they may appear. Envy is the fuel of their radicalism, and they resent people who have more than they do. Deep down, they want the same stuff.

Paying for lawyers can ruin the net worth of a couple like Bernie and Jane. We'll know that the case is serious when they launch a legal defense fund.

WARREN IS AN ADVOCATE FOR NO-

STRINGS AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION

LOOTING MEXICANS WHO HAVE VOTED

DEM FOR MORE!

Sander's fraudulent claims to be leading a “political

revolution” against the “billionaire class” were designed to

corral popular anger and promote illusions in the

Democratic Party, one of the two parties of the American

corporate-financial aristocracy, as a party representing the

interests of working people.

"Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who parlayed

her brief tenure as a rubber-stamp banking

regulator during Obama’s first term into a

Senate seat."

Hey Bernie! Welcome to the millionaire’s club!

By Tom Hall13 June 2017

Personal finance disclosure forms submitted by Bernie Sanders, and widely reported in the media, reveal that Sanders’ income was more than $1 million last year. This figure includes both his $174,000 annual salary as a senator and $858,750 from book royalties, including a nearly $800,000 advance for a book, Our Revolution, about his 2016 presidential primary campaign.

The threshold for the wealthiest 1 percent by annual income

in the United States is $389,436, according to the Economic

Policy Institute. Sanders’ income would put him somewhere

in the top one-fifth of one percent, according to US Census

data.

The wealth of the average US senator and representative has skyrocketed in recent years, earning Congress a reputation as a “millionaire’s club.” In 2014, the average personal wealth across both houses of Congress surpassed $1 million for the first time in history, with the median net worth of the Senate surging from $2.5 to $2.7 million.

However, few members of Congress are able to amass as much wealth in a single year as Bernie Sanders did last year. Opensecrets.org shows that Sanders’ book royalties alone would been the third-highest outside income in the Senate in 2014, the last year for which the site has figures. At $1.2 million, first place that year went to fellow “progressive” Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who parlayed

her brief tenure as a rubber-stamp banking

regulator during Obama’s first term into a

Senate seat.

Opensecrets.org’s records show that, for years, you have been forced to subsist on income levels at or around the threshold of the top 1 percent, in the low-to-mid six figures. This, no doubt, is what you had in mind during a primary debate last year when you described yourself as “one of the poorer members of the United States Senate.”

But 2016 was a turning point in your career. The $1 million

payday you received last year is payment for services

rendered during your intervention in last year’s Democratic

primaries. Your fraudulent claims to be leading a “political

revolution” against the “billionaire class” were designed to

corral popular anger and promote illusions in the Democratic

Party, one of the two parties of the American corporate-

financial aristocracy, as a party representing the interests of

working people.

And while you attracted considerable interest from left-leaning workers and young people with your false claims to be a socialist, you rejected basic socialist measures such as the nationalization of key industries, endorsed American imperialism’s wars of conquest, and defended a truculent nationalism which pitted American workers against their brothers and sisters internationally.

Your intervention was all the more crucial as the Democratic Party was preparing to nominate Hillary Clinton, who was widely and deservedly hated as a stooge of Wall Street and the military. You threw your support to her in the Democratic National Convention and presented her candidacy as a continuation of your so-called “political revolution.” You declared that electing Clinton was an urgent necessity to defeat Trump, in spite of the fact that her pro-war, anti-working class agenda was no less reactionary than Trump’s.

But your work was not yet done. When this produced a debacle for the Democrats in the November election, you were elevated to a more responsible position within the Democratic political hierarchy, working closely with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, whose election campaigns have received tens of millions of dollars in funding from Wall Street. You crossed the country stumping for Democrats with the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, former Obama cabinet member Tom Perez.

You have even emerged as a de facto leader of a wing of the Democratic Party concerned that the party’s focus on the right-wing campaign over Russia against Trump at the expense of posturing over social issues could open the door to the emergence of a mass popular movement outside the control of the Democrats, a potential threat to capitalism. Nevertheless, you have supported the Democrats’ unsubstantiated accusations of Russian collusion with Trump, which are designed to force a confrontation with the world’s second largest nuclear power.

In your campaign to corral social opposition behind the Democrats, you have received the crucial aid of the middle class, pseudo-left organizations which function as satellites of the Democratic Party. They all presented as good coin your calls for a “political revolution” and either endorsed your candidacy, as in the case of Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialists of America, or, like the International Socialist Organization, issued mildly worded tactical criticisms of your decision to run as a Democrat rather than continuing the charade of running statewide in Vermont as an “independent.” As with your own campaign, their goal was to prevent the emergence of a genuine socialist movement within the working class capable of challenging American capitalism. Many of them made the trek to Chicago this weekend to hear you speak at the People’s Summit, an annual gathering of what passes for the Democratic Party’s “left.”

The pseudo-left is also being handsomely rewarded for their services to capitalism. Last year, the Ford Foundation announced that it was donating $100 million to Black Lives Matter; it has since cashed in through such investments as a “black debit card” and other projects promoting black capitalism.

Last year’s million, you have reason to hope, will be the first of many. Given the explosive character of the political and economic conditions in the United States, and the broad hostility workers feel towards both the Trump administration and his Democratic opponents, the ruling class will very likely continue to value your political services.

“The response to the publication of these speeches by so-called “socialist” Bernie Sanders exposes the utterly fraudulent character of his entire presidential bid. While he postured during the Democratic Party primaries as a proponent of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” Sanders now functions shamelessly as a sideshow for the Clinton campaign, browbeating his (now much smaller) audiences with admonitions to vote for the preferred candidate of the “billionaire class” he claimed to oppose.”

FOLLOWING THE CRIMES OF BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BECOMES AMERICA’S ROAD TO REVOLUTION

"Hillary Clinton is a known liar, a criminal of monstrous proportions; others have gone to prison for crimes she has committed over and over: lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, violating national security laws by which she was bound as Secretary of State, etc. It's a long list."

Clinton, the candidate favored by most of Wall Street and the corporate elite and large sections of the Republican Party establishment, is seeking to assemble something akin, within the framework of the US political setup, to a grand coalition between the Democratic Party and the Republican leadership.

Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton

speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which

she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’ health benefits; and huge cuts in income taxes for the wealthy and corporate taxes.

“But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at

the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly

entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their

friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core

beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every

person on the planet by now.”

Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested

administration!

BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!

“Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.”

“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.”

“So when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged in prison.”

THE DEMISE AND ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION of HILLARY CLINTON

"Hillary Clinton is a known liar, a criminal of monstrous proportions; others have gone to prison for crimes she has committed over and over: lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, violating national security laws by which she was bound as Secretary of State, etc. It's a long list."

Clinton, the candidate favored by most of Wall Street and the corporate elite and large sections of the Republican Party establishment, is seeking to assemble something akin, within the framework of the US political setup, to a grand coalition between the Democratic Party and the Republican leadership.

Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’ health benefits; and huge cuts in income taxes for the wealthy and corporate taxes.

“But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now.”

Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested

administration!

BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!

“Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.”

“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.”

“The response to the publication of these speeches by so-called “socialist” Bernie Sanders exposes the utterly fraudulent character of his entire presidential bid. While he postured during the Democratic Party primaries as a proponent of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” Sanders now functions shamelessly as a sideshow for the Clinton campaign, browbeating his (now much smaller) audiences with admonitions to vote for the preferred candidate of the “billionaire class” he claimed to oppose.”

FOLLOWING THE CRIMES OF BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BECOMES AMERICA’S ROAD TO REVOLUTION

"Hillary Clinton is a known liar, a criminal of monstrous proportions; others have gone to prison for crimes she has committed over and over: lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, violating national security laws by which she was bound as Secretary of State, etc. It's a long list."

Clinton, the candidate favored by most of Wall Street and the corporate elite and large sections of the Republican Party establishment, is seeking to assemble something akin, within the framework of the US political setup, to a grand coalition between the Democratic Party and the Republican leadership.

Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton

speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which

she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’ health benefits; and huge cuts in income taxes for the wealthy and corporate taxes.

“But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at

the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly

entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their

friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core

beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every

person on the planet by now.”

Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested

administration!

BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!

“Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.”

“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.”

“So when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged in prison.”

The American financial and bankster oligarchy, steeped in criminality and parasitism, can produce only a government of war, social reaction and repression. In its blind avarice, it is creating the conditions for unprecedented social upheavals. It is hurtling toward its own revolutionary demise at the hands of the working class.

"Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem with MS-13 and other gangs."AMERICA: WALL STREET, THE DEMOCRAT

PARTY, THE GOP and LA RAZA SAY NO

LEGAL NEED APPLY!

“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the last four decades and while the U.S. represents just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according to a new report.”

Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.

Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground.

Potential Federal Government Response to California’s SB 54

WASHINGTON (June 22, 2017) – A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies examines the administration's option of limiting foreign student entries and immigration activities in "sanctuary" jurisdictions as a potential federal response to state and local obstruction of immigration enforcement. This could be especially important if California's SB54 – with its stringent anti-cooperation requirements – is passed and signed into law. SB54 has been approved by the Senate and is currently before the Assembly.

If SB54 blocks the Cal State and California Community College systems' required cooperation with ICE, DHS may be forced to decertify them for purposes of admitting foreign students.

Andrew Arthur, the Center's Resident Fellow in Law and Policy and author of the report, stated, "If the State of California prevents schools from satisfying their obligations under federal immigration law, then DHS needs to consider whether those schools should be allowed to maintain their certifications to accept foreign students."

Foreign student visas are available only to people who will be attending schools certified by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), a component of the ICE National Security Investigations Division. By regulation, SEVP-certified schools must designate school officials to regularly provide information to ICE to verify that the foreign students are maintaining their status while in the country, and to notify ICE when those students are not.

This requirement ensures that the government has essential data on those students necessary for national security and immigration-enforcement purposes. This is especially important given the fact that, as DHS recently reported, almost three percent of all foreign students whose authorized status was supposed to end in FY 2016 are suspected of overstaying and illegally remaining in the United States.

The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.

"Possibly most affected by this shift in the economy is the Millennial generation, those aged 18-30. The report notes that more than half of those under age 25 participate in independent work, not just in the United States but throughout the European Union as well."

June 22, 2017

Government says 30% of children caught at border have ties to violent drug gangs

Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem with MS-13 and other gangs.

Federal officials refused even to guess at the true scope of the problem, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that they can give only small snapshots of what they see. But they said the devastation on communities across the country is clear: killings and chaos, particularly among other immigrants — both legal and illegal.

The Border Patrol identified 160 teens who were known or suspected gang members when they first showed up at the border, but whom the Obama administration said it had to admit under U.S. law.

Meanwhile, a spot check this month of 138 teens being held by the federal Health and Human Services Department identified 39 with gang ties. Four of them were forced into cooperating with the gangs and 35 joined voluntarily, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“It is well-known that MS-13 actively targets and recruits children as young as 8 years old,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee who called Wednesday’s hearing.

“While their illegal status and Central American heritage are a key factor in MS-13’s targeting, without a doubt the failures of the current system for handling these children is also to blame,” he said. “The current system is fraught with abuse, systematic errors and a lack of effective cooperation.”

He was stunned that no agency could say how many “UAC,” as the government dubs unaccompanied alien children, have been recruited.

The agencies point to one another and to federal laws, saying their hands are tied.

Agencies are reviewing Obama-era interpretations of the law, but it seems incomprehensible that this loophole can exist. It seems clear that M-13 and other gangs are using the children and US policy on dealing with unaccompanied minors at the border to engage in gang activity on American soil.

Officials said MS-13 is involved in some drug dealing and does engage in human trafficking, but its real money-making operation is extortion. The gang threatens families — including American citizens — with violence against relatives back in Central America unless those in the U.S. pay them off.

Gang members in the U.S. take directions directly from gang commanders in El Salvador, authorities say.

Kenneth A. Blanco, acting assistant attorney general in the criminal division at the Justice Department, also said immigrants who fail to report crimes to local police are often not afraid of being deported by federal authorities, but rather fear retaliation from the gang members and other criminals who live in their neighborhoods.

He said witnesses’ names become public, making them targets for retribution.

“That really, in my 28 years, has been the fear they have of calling the police. Not so much the other way around,” he said. “They’re really scared of these people.”

That runs counter to the argument made by Democrats and some local police chiefs that illegal immigrants refuse to report crimes because they fear entanglement with federal deportation agents.

These kinds of "below the radar" policies cost lives. That should be the bottom line in creating and implementing any immigration and refugee policy regardless whether it affects adults or children. That 30% of children who we've been told only want to come to America to get away from gang violence, are themselves, engaged in gang activity is a clear and present danger to Americans and illegal immigrants alike.

That the government has known of this problem for years and allowed it to continue is the height of stupidity and bureaucratic incompetence.

Federal ‘OPT’ Program Rewards Companies For Hiring 330,000 Foreign College Grads in 2016

The federal government quietly helped and rewarded companies and universities which hired roughly 330,000 cheap foreign graduates in 2016 instead of hiring American graduates, many of whom are deep in debt.

The little-known “Optional Practical Training” program has grown from 91,140 new foreign job-seekers in 2009 to 329,158 new job-seekers in 2016, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. That is almost a four-fold increase in seven years — and the program is growing even larger in 2017.

There is no cap on the OPT program, which quietly and semi-automatically gives work permits lasting up to three years when requested by foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities and colleges. Companies are not required to even interview Americans before hiring OPT graduates — and they get tax breaks for hiring foreigners over Americans.

“The government is enticing employers to hire foreigners instead of Americans … it is ridiculous,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies. Even the middle-class Americans who have downplayed the impact of cheap-labor immigration on blue-collar Americans should be alarmed by the government’s discrimination against their own college-graduate children, he added.

In 2014, the OPT program provided work permits to 249,998 foreign graduates, according to the data provided to Breitbart News by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the program. Two years later, the number of new foreign graduates entering the program had risen by 32 percent up to 329,158.

The program provides a one-year work permit to all graduates. It also provides an extra one-year permit to graduates who work in a so-called high-tech “STEM” job. In 2016, officials working for former President Barack Obama extended the STEM permits from one year to two years. If only 20,000 of the 51,672 STEM workers from 2015 used Obama’s one-year extension, they would have increased the 2016 total from 329,158 up to 350,000.

That 350,000 estimate for 2016 means that the government is offering work permits to one foreign graduate for almost every two of the 800,000 young Americans who graduate from college each year with high-skilled degrees in business or medicine, science or software, math or physics.

The OPT program will likely grow to 500,000 foreign workers in 2020 unless it is killed by a pending lawsuit.

Under the new transparency rules established by DHS secretary John Kelly, DHS officials also provided Breitbart with the initial OPT numbers for 2017. That data showed the OPT program in the first half of 2017 by giving work permits to 255,412 foreign students, including 57,315 high-skill technology graduates. That half-year number for 2017 is larger than the 2014 total.

These high numbers likely understate the scale of the OPT outsourcing program, because the federal government also allows foreign students to get a one-year work permit via the “Curriculum Practical Training” program before they graduate into the OPT program. If 100,000 students used that CPT program in 2016, then the combined CPT and OPT programs delivered almost 450,000 white-collar American jobs to foreign students and graduates in 2016.

The annual inflow of new foreign OPT workers is now roughly three times larger than the annual inflow of 110,000 H-1B white-collar contract workers. However, the H-1B program offers longer visas to foreign workers, so it keeps a larger population of roughly 650,000 foreign white-collar workers in the United States, compared to roughly 35o,000 OPT workers.

The H-1B visas help companies hire foreign white-collar workers to take the place of the experienced American professionals who need decent salaries to help support and educate their children.

Who is impacted?

Many American college graduates are threatened by OPT, partly because the program allows foreign students to take any job, but also because the government grants three-year work permits to students who take “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math” jobs — but those STEM jobs are very expansively described. They include:

The OPT program is also a threat to upward mobility because it is increasingly being used to outsource community college technician jobs — such as nursing — which are the primary upward path for Americans born into lower-income families. The DHS list of STEM jobs also includes more than 50 types of technical jobs, including:

Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an unpublished analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers … “It has been like this for the past five, six years now,” said Ban Cheah, a research professor at Georgetown who compiled the data. “It’s a little depressing.”

Liberty University, graduation 2017.

Many recent graduates were hurt long-term by the slump, according to a 2014 Pew rstudy:

In a recent report, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York went deeper and looked at underemployment among recent grads (defined as people aged 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree). The Fed researchers used data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine whether employed grads were in jobs that typically required a college degree, what those jobs paid, and whether they were working full- or part-time. They found that in 2012, about 44% of grads were working in jobs that didn’t require a college degree — a rate that, while about what it was in early 1990s, increased after the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions. Only 36% of that group were in what the researchers called “good non-college jobs” — those paying around $45,000 a year — down from around half in the 1990s. The share of underemployed recent grads in low-wage (below $25,000) jobs rose from about 15% in 1990 to more than 20%. About one-in-five (23%) underemployed recent grads were working part-time in 2011, up from 15% in 2000.

Critically, the OPTs compete with new American graduates and nudge down the Americans’ starting salaries — which can have a huge impact on their lifetime earnings, say salary experts:

“Maximizing your first salary is really important because it determines your salary for the rest of your life,” says Matt Wallaert, chief scientist at GetRaised.com … “Your final salary is heavily dependent on your starting salary,” agrees Glenn Hiemstra, the founder of Futurist.com,

Moreover, many U.S. graduates are defaulting on college loan debts owed to the U.S. government because they cannot find well-paying jobs.

Joseph Palos, a high-tech graduate from Cornell University, formally objected to the OPT program in 2015. ”Companies don’t want to hire Americans and they abuse… OPT to hire cheap immobile labor instead of hiring anyone over the age of 35, especially in software or tech areas,” he wrote to a federal agency, according to a report in ComputerWorld.

Which companies hire OPTs?

Most universities and colleges hide useful data about their OPT programs from their American students, the tuition-paying parents and the voting public.

But a Breitbart search of the data revealed that Penn State posted a list of companies which hire OPT and other foreign graduates. The companies include accounting firms Deloitte & Touché LLP plus Ernst & Young, LLP, as well as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the GE Global Research Center in New York. Other OPT employers included Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, Calif., Intel in Arizona, Motorola in Florida, Nokia in Texas, and Microsoft in Washington State, plus Cadbury Schweppes in New Jersey, Glaxo Smith Kline in Philadelphia, Hyatt Hotels in Washington D.C., Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Penske Logistics in Ohio, and the Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands, Ca.

The Penn State list also includes many universities, many of which can keep cheap OPTs on the payroll for several years by converting them into H-1B employees. There are no limits on universities’ hiring of H-1Bs.

There’s not much reason to blame the companies for hiring OPTs, said Krikorian. By reducing employers’ taxes and subsidizing OPT employees’ pay with a chance to win green cards, “the government is encouraging these employers to hire foreign workers,” he said.

Who supports the OPT program?

Unsurprisingly, the semi-secret OPT program has intense behind-the-scenes support in Washington.

First, the OPT program — like the similar H-1B and H-2B programs — are strongly supported by business groups because they provide very cheap, compliant and disposable workers:

When a job is given to an OPT worker, neither the worker nor the employers have to pay Social Security or Medicare taxes. That tax break cuts the company’s salary costs for that foreign worker by roughly 23 percent.

When a foreign students seeks a job, Americans lose bargaining power to get decent wages for that jobs. Nationalwide, the extra inflow of immigrant labor annually transfers roughy $500 billion from employees to employers, accordin to data in the 2016 report on immigration by the National Acadeimes of Sciences.

The OPT jobs put the foreign graduates on the first step towards citizenship, which is a hugely valuable deferred bonus student studemt her overseas fmaily and their descedents in perpetuity. In effect, the federal government provides OPT workers a free lottery ticket for the prize of citizenship if they work for the pay and conditions set by the employer. But this is also a huge hidden subsidy for employers who hire foreigners instead of Americans because it allows employers to pay foreigners with hope of citizenship, while Americans must be paid in dollars.

Also, the OPT employers is heavily dependent on the employer to put him or her the next step on the path to citizenship, ensuring a compliant attitude despute low-pay and long hours. The next step is usually a H-1B visa, which requires the employer to ask the govrenment for the visa.

The OPT program adds a small but useful addition to the number of native-born and immigrant consumers who buy products in hte U.S. economy.

Universities strongly favor the OPT program because it allows them to effectively sell government-supplied, no-cost work permits to the foreign students who pay higher than normal tuition fees — providing there is no political pushback from their own indebted graduates and their worried parents.

The annual inflow of foreign students adds $2.8 billion in economic activity, and 400,000 jobs to the economy, says the NAFSA advocacy group, wich is led by university officials. Few politicians are willing to openly disagree with the universities in their district.

Universities market themselves to foreign customers as way-stations to citizenship. For example, Dartmouth University highlighted employment statistics for foreign graduates, saying 71 of 79 foreign graduates got work permits and jobs in 2015, and 79 of 86 got work permits and jobs in 2014.

A growing percentage of foreign students are using the OPT work permits. The percentage rose from 21.5 percent in 2014 up to 24.5 percent in 2016, according to DHS data.

The OPT and CPT programs allow a growing number low-grade “diploma mill” universities to provide work permits to foreign workers in exchange for tuition. The scale of the new industry was described by Buzzfeed in 2016: “With little fanfare and virtually overnight, Nothwestern Polytechnic has become one of the country’s largest importers of international students — 95% of whom are Indian. Last year, 9,026 foreign students had active visas to attend NPU, according to federal immigration data — that’s more students than the entire undergraduate population of Harvard, and an increase of 350% from two years earlier, when Northwestern had just 1,200 … Northwestern Polytechnic’s 9,026 foreign students would make up the ninth-largest body of international students in the country, according to IIE numbers — above Michigan State University and just below UCLA.”

Education-industry officials have downplayed the number of OPT approvals for several years. For example, the New York-based Institute of International Education estimated 67,804 OPT job-seekers in 2009, and 147,498 OPT seekers in 2016. In contrast, DHS estimated the numbers at 91,140 in 2009 and 329,158 in 2016.

Progressives strongly favor the OPT program, partly because it is backed by their prestigious allies in the Internet industry and by university groups, but also because it levels the status of foreigners and Americans.

In June 2017, a pro-immigration columnist for the New York Times, who formerly worked at the Wall Street Journal, argued that Americans rightly belongs to foreigners, not Americans, saying:

I’m the child of immigrants and grew up abroad, I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers — the people who strain hardest to become a part of it because they realize that it’s precious; and who do the most to remake it so that our ideas, and our appeal, may stay fresh.

That used to be a cliché, but in the Age of [President Donald] Trump it needs to be explained all over again. We’re a country of immigrants — by and for them, too. Americans who don’t get it should get out.

GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan backs programs that allow low-tech business to import cheap foreign workers instead of hiring U.S. workers. “We need to have an immigration system that is wired for what our economy needs … so let’s find out where those gaps in our labor markets are and have our immigration system wired for that,” Ryan said in 2016.

President Barack Obama declared in 2014 that Americans do not have the right to favor their fellow citizens over foreigners, saying:

Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently. And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration. If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks’ — even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.

Under Obama’s lax border policies, roughly 550,000 additional illegal aliens flew or walked into the United States in 2016, while only a tiny percentage of the 11 million resident illegals were sent home.

This bipartisan open-border viewpoint is part of the law and played a large role in Obama’s policies. For example, from 2011 to 2016, Obama used a loophole in federal law to allow more than 300,000 unskilled migrants from Central American to live and work in the United States, despite the harmful impact on the kids’ schools and local crime rates.

Economic and Political Impact

These pro-immigration views held by progressives and business-minded Republicans means that the federal government now imports one million legal immigrants each year to compete for jobs against the 4 million Americans who graduate from schools or colleges each year.

The federal government also imports more than 1 million temporary contract workers, including roughly 110,000 H-1B workers per year. That rapid rise of the secret OPT program — plus likely rises in other semi-secret L and B-1 visas — suggest that the government allows companies and universities to keep an army of more than 1.6 million foreign contract-workers in the United States.

Most of those foreign contract workers are white-collar professionals, while fewer than 100,000 are legal temporary agricultural workers, according to the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute.

This social conflict also distorts Americans’ politics, allowing the inauguration of New York real-estate magnate Donald Trump on January 20, 2017.

Since then, despite massive bipartisan pressure from politicians and industry groups eager for cheap labor, Trump has declared his policy to be “Buy American, Hire American.” He has scuttled the cheap-labor Trans-Pacific Partnership program, sharply reduced illegal immigration, slowed the growth of contract workers programs, started reforming the H-1B white-collar outsourcing program, and eliminated the ‘DAPA’ amnesty for four million illegals.

Because of pressure from progressives in the media and the Democratic Party, Trump has also preserved some of Obama’s open-borders rules, such as the 2012 ‘DACA’ policy which delivers work permits to roughly 765,000 younger illegals.

So far, Trump and his deputies have done little publicly to curb the fast-growing OPT program — even though it discriminates against the children of politically influential college-graduates. “You would think that when their own college-educated kids are being discriminated against, it would get attention,” said Krikorian.

However, in December 2016, the Department of Education disbarred the accreditation organization which validated the NPU’s educational claims. In March 2017, Trump’s DHS stopping issuing OPT or H-1B approvals to foreign students from the diploma-mill colleges which rely on that accrediting organization.

However, Trump’s officials will soon need to deal with the legality of the “crony capitalist” OPT program, said lawyer John Miano, who is suing the federal government on behalf of the Washington Alliance of Tech Workers. His lawsuit shows how OPT was created by regulators in 1992 and then expanded in 2002 without any action by Congress or an agency regulatory process. The legal claim is strong, he said, because “we have the government making law via regulation… [what is] the largest guest worker program” in the nation.

But without strong public pressure on legislators, the corporate and university pressure for the OPT program will likely deter the Trump administration from accepting a courtroom defeat over OTP, Miano said. “I don’t expect the Trump administration to say ‘We can’t defend it’ … [but] we don’t know what they are planning to do.”

THE ENTIRE REASON WE HAVE OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

The Seattle Minimum Wage Study Is Utter B.S.

For decades, conservative ideologues have insisted that raising the minimum wage will hurt, not help, low-wage workers. Mandating higher wages will cost jobs, the old canard goes, and the obvious solution is to let the free market function unfettered.

This argument received a significant bump from a recent study by the University of Washington (UW) looking at the impact of the minimum wage increase in Seattle, where in 2014 the city council voted to phase in a $15 wage over the next few years.

The UW study appeared to show that the 2015–2016 wage floor increase from $11 to $13 per hour, one phase on that journey to $15, caused low-wage workers’ annual pay to go down, not up, and overall low-wage jobs to also go down.

Free-market fanatics around the country flung praise at the study, and serious publications like the Washington Post deemed it “very credible.” But fortunately for working people, it turns out the study’s findings are far from that.

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The research has significant flaws—most glaringly that its data excludes 40% of the Seattle workforce. It also stands in contrast to a massive trove of actually credible studies showing that raising the minimum wage is a boon for working class families and the communities they live in.

For instance, a team led by Michael Reich, an economics professor at University of California-Berkeley, looked at the impact of the Seattle wage increase on the food industry over the same period and found that wages did in fact go up for restaurant workers, and that employment wasn't affected. These findings were, they claim, “in line with the lion’s share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies.”

Reich and his colleagues have done a significant portion of this research , recently studying cities with the highest minimum wage laws in the country, including Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. They've consistently found that higher wages boost worker pay and haven't led to either job loss or a slowdown in economic growth.

If so much research shows significantly raising the minimum wage has a major net-positive impact, what’s the story with the UW study?

One of the major limitations of the study, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out, is that the data it analyzed excluded business with multiple locations, such as chain restaurants and big box retailers. So the 40% of employees they left out work at places like McDonald's, Best Buy, and other stores that rely heavily on the low-wage workers who got the actual boost. That is a highly significant oversight.

The UW study also draws what the EPI calls "implausible findings." Since high-paying jobs went up during the period that low-paying jobs went down, the study implies that the minimum wage hike created better jobs for the rich at the expense of the poor. But this explanation fails to take into account the overall robustness and gentrification of Seattle's economy—a much more reasonable explanation for the disparity.

Given these flaws, it's no wonder that UW's findings diverge greatly from the broader body of research on this topic, much of which the UW researchers themselves cite.

Raising the minimum wage—at the city, state, or federal level, where it remains an unlivable $7.25 an hour—is still a reliable solution to the scourge of inequality. Research should continue to look critically at its impact, but so far the only credible research gives the policy a big thumps up.